CSS or Cascading Style Sheets has evolved over time with version CSS1, CSS2, and the most recently CSS2.1. Most of the newer major browser such as Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3 and Safari provide support for the new feature in CSS 2.1. However, some of the most widely used browsers such as Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 do not support all the new features that CSS2.1 utilize.
Even though commonly used browsers such as Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6/7 do not render some of the new features correctly, they do render most common CSS features faithfully. So as long as the stylesheet use predominantly CSS1 and commonly used CSS2/CSS2.1 features, the Web pages should render consistently across different platform
To ensure that our style sheet is cross-browser compatible, designers should have a good understanding of the new CSS 2.1 Specification and to utilize css vaildation tools such as W3C CSS Validation Service to help them ensuring their style sheet is vaild.
Designer needs to ensure that not only are they are writing vaild CSS code, but the new features are test across different platform to ensure that older browser can render the new feature correctly and make any necessary adjustment to ensure compatibility.
Writing clean code is not hard as long as the designer have a clear understanding of what they need to be accomplish to ensure cross-browser compatibility in all CSS that they create and to utilize vaildation tools in all CSS work.
Tags: css 2.1, CSS Vaildation tools